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By Monica DaveyTHE NEW YORK TIMES • Thursday July 24, 2014 6:31 AM

DETROIT — The trial of a suburban homeowner accused of the shotgun killing of a young black
woman last fall opened yesterday with jarring images projected on a large screen before jurors:
Renisha McBride, 19, grinning for the camera. And then, McBride, bloodied and lifeless on a
porch.

The shooting ignited racial tensions here because the homeowner, Theodore P. Wafer, is white.
But prosecutors did not make race an issue.

They began their case by recounting the events that led to the death of McBride after she
appeared at Wafer’s front door in Dearborn Heights in the middle of a November night. McBride, who
had been in a car crash, was unarmed when she approached the stranger’s house, prosecutors say, but
Wafer opened his front door and fired a shotgun at her head through a locked screen door.

“The defendant in this case had other options,” Danielle Hagaman-Clark, an assistant Wayne
County prosecutor, told the jury in her opening statement, laying out the second-degree murder,
manslaughter and weapons charges Wafer faces. “He could have called 911, but he didn’t. His actions
that night were unnecessary, unjustified and unreasonable.”

The defense said Wafer, 55, had been acting in self-defense, believing that someone — perhaps
multiple people — was breaking into the small house where he lived alone.

“Boom! Boom! Boom!” Cheryl Carpenter, Wafer’s attorney, bellowed at the top of her voice,
portraying the pounding at his doors that she says awakened Wafer before 5 a.m. on Nov. 2. The
banging went on, from side door to front door, Carpenter said, as Wafer fumbled around, in terror,
in the dark — unable to find his cellphone and only eventually getting his shotgun.

In Michigan, a self-defense law allows deadly force only if a person “honestly and reasonably
believes” that it is necessary to prevent an imminent death or great bodily harm. Under Michigan’s
so-called castle doctrine, there is no legal requirement for a person to retreat if inside his or
her home.